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Dinner, courtesy of garden...

11 October, 2012

It's only 5 days in, but I'm loving daylight savings. Getting home from work and having what feels like hours before it gets dark (its still light outside as I type, amazing!) just adds to the joy of gathering garden produce for dinner. As there is no rush to pick in the failing light, I can just take my time meandering around the garden, checking up on how plants are going, adding to my mental gardening to do list, and generally procrastinating before cooking dinner.

A previous garden meander showed that the perpetual spinach needed a culling, and as I had ricotta in the fridge I had planned ahead and bought filo pastry to make spinach and ricotta parcels.

My eyes had not deceived me. This was a restrained culling of the perpetual spinach. I could have easily taken more.

Please forgive the next photo. I was feeling artsy. It serves no additional purpose, but its peurty.

I used the whole basket of spinach, one onion diced and about 200g of ricotta to make the filling, along with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

And then a miracle happened. As I was chopping up the spinach and cooking it in batches so the water evaporated off and didn't make the filling mixture too soggy, I remembered I had some parsley and garlic flavoured butter in the fridge from when I had made garlic bread on the weekend. So I had the idea of using that to butter in between the filo layers. Genius!

I figured half the butter would be enough.

So I buttered and layered 4 sheets of filo.

After I had 4 sheets glued togeather I put about 4 heaped tablespoons of filling in the corner and folded over the sheet, and then did the diagonal fold repetition thing until I ended up with a triangle parcel. I won't even attempt to explain it here. Surely its on youtube somewhere...

But either way, after repeating the above a few times over, I ended up with this.

These then went into a 200C degree oven for about 20 minutes.

That gave me plenty of time to go out and pick ingredients for salad.

All up this was the end result, plus some lamb kofta's that I bought pre-made, with a yoghurt sauce.